Mental health is just as important as your physical health. Feed your mind with positivity!

Body Dysmorphic Disorder: When seeing isn’t believing.

In high school Amy Pietrangolare was a straight ‘A’ student and a varsity cheerleader. On the surface she appeared to have it all. Beauty and brains with a large loving family. But underneath it all she was hiding a dark secret. She suffered from a mental disorder known as body dysmorphic disorder or BDD.

Sufferers of BDD have an extremely distorted image of how they actually appear. Pietrangolare admitted she had an intense fear of becoming over-weight. Often exercising excessively to the point of exhaustion. Having BDD has caused her to develop a rocky relationship with food even causing her to develop bulimia in high school. The hardest part she says was trying to hide her condition from her family.

“It’s been a struggle all my life, but I think it really got out of control in high school. Believe me hiding it from my huge off-the-boat Italian family was hard. I’d walk in the door and they’d try to shove food down my throat.” Pietrangolare says she hated looking in the mirror but couldn’t keep her eyes off the scale.

Pietrangolare 20, now a junior at the College at Brockport has a contagious smile and a personality big enough to fill the entire room. Her social media is filled with body positive pictures, quotes and messages. Sometimes posting multiple times a day. These serve as a reminder to herself and others that may be secretly suffering the same way she has. A reminder that no one is perfect.

“My goal is to become a more positive person and to spread my energy and excitement for life with everyone. If I could make one person smile a day, that’s when I feel good” Says Pietrangolare.

Pietrangolare is very petite, standing at around 5’0”. Her roommate of three years Katie Porter 20, describes her as ‘A little bundle of positive energy’. She enjoys going to Pietrangolare for mini pep-talks and burst of motivation. But knows she wasn’t always this way. Porter was the first person Pietrangolare met at the College at Brockport and has seen her growth first hand.

In hopes of starting over, Pietrangolare started freshman year much like any other student with bright dreams to become a healthier person. After gaining some healthy weight back stress from school, home, and her then abusive relationship, took a toll on Pietrangolare. Feeling more alone than ever before sent her even deeper into her self-harming ways.

Luckily for Pietrangolare she has found balance in her life. Learning how to love herself is becoming much easier. She prides herself in her newly found strength but still struggles with BDD everyday. She surrounds herself with more positive outlets to take back control in her life.

Relearning how to eat the right way is a goal she has set for herself. Coming from a very heavily Italian-American influenced background much of her diet in the past was various pasta dishes and bread. Lots and lots of bread. Learning to incorporate variety while still staying on a broke college students budget has proven to be a struggle of its own.

Pietrangolare credits her strength and determination for a healthier life to her current boyfriend and new friends she’s met in the recent year. “Their like my little cheerleaders and I’m right there cheering with them”.